Spatial visualisation

Jan-Philipp Kolb

Tue Sep 08 20:58:58 2015

Hello world

Fra Mauro Map

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  • Drawing maps has a long history
  • Fra Mauro map (1450) is the greatest memorial of medieval cartography
  • Source: Wikipedia

Migrant route to Germany

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  • Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The Independent

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Motivation

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

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GDP in German federal states

  • Map produced with R-package sp

  • Data source: Wikipedia

  • Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

More detailed - more interesting?

Social index - Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

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Source: Tagesspiegel

Is the necessary data available?

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The spatial perspective…

  • … is relevant to get an overview of current developments

  • … is relevant to understand circumstances.

But how to get the adequate data?

  • Necessary data is often not available
  • More spatial visualisations are possible with web-data via Application Programming Interface (API)

A little quiz - which town is it?

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Background info

  • Map of photographic/traffic activity
  • Data from flickr used
  • Guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
  • Time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
    • Black is walking (less than 7mph),
    • Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
    • Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
    • Green is freeways or rapid transit.

New York

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Source: Eric Fischer

Two ideas combined

World Map Of Touristiness

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Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Locals and Tourists

  • Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

  • Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

  • Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month).

Tourists and Locals

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Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

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Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

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More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

  • Massive amounts of data … and growing!
  • Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
  • Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
  • Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
  • Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Organisation

Targets

I want to….

  • … show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
  • … talk about the developments of maps/geography.
  • … clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
  • … show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
  • … tell you where you can find data.

Source

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Learning by doing

Source

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

  • Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
  • Learning by doing is very important

Background

Personal information

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University of Trier

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Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

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Source: orangesmile

Source: Urban day

  link1 <- paste(graph.path,"MannheimMap.jpg",sep="")
# http://www.heimatundwelt.de/kartenansicht.xtp?artId=978-3-14-100260-7&stichwort=Quadrate&fs=1

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Gesis Mannheim

  link1 <- paste(graph.path,"GESISMannheim.png",sep="")

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Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

  • Monitoring Society and Social Change

  • Data Archive for the Social Sciences

  • Computational Social Science

  • Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

  • Infrastructure Services for social sciences

  • over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

  • Consulting for research projects in all phases

  • Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

  • Planning of survey designs
  • Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
  • Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

  • Where do you come from?
  • What are you studying?
  • What are your research interests?
  • Which map would be interesting for you?

Tools for this course

Tools and services

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Why use R

Why use R - It’s open source

  • It’s free
  • It’s open source
  • …

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; itÂ’s a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/

Why use R - many specific packages

A big number of (very specific) packages:

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Overview of available packages on CRAN

Why use R - overview of reasons

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Why use R - interfaces

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Why use R - GIS

R can be used as geographic information systems (GIS)

Why use R - visualisation

Because it is possible to create nice graphics:

Github stack

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Using Github

Github page

  • All relevant resources for this course will be available at:

https://github.com/Japhilko/GeoData

If you are interested in what is behind the scenes:

First steps in R

How to learn R

I will try to keep it simple and provide lots of resources.

Basic R

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Download and install R

  • Click here to download R for Windows.

  • R for other platforms (Linux and Mac OS) is available under:

http://mirrors.softliste.de/cran/

Rstudio

pic21 Source: R-programming